For a start, do you think Baidu.com is a search engine? I certainly do, and so does Wikipedia. But when it comes to Google Analytics, things stop being so simple. Compare screengrabs 1 and 2 below. As we can see, on the first screen grab baidu.com is tracked as a referral site; on the second it is included among “Search Engines”.

The arrival of Bing was announced in late May, but until 6 June Microsoft’s new baby was “scanned” (pun intended) as a referring site in our clients’ logs (screen grab 2). Since 6 June it has grown up to be among search engines (screen grab 3). This kind of acceleration only happens in the Internet world, it seems, but nevertheless it doesn’t address the problem of incongruity when it comes to identifying and categorising tracking sources in Google Analytics. An article on Search Engine Watch blog, dated per 9 June, mentions that Google plans to include Bing in the default list of search engines.

Better still, the article was prompted by checking GA this morning and finding that Google itself was tracked as a referral site (screen grab 4). In other words, as great as Google Analytics is, it absolutely needs to be improved. And while I’m on it, I will say that the first thing it must improve NOW is to automate tracking of clicks on outgoing links. You still have to add a piece of code on the outgoing link, including files and images, if you want to see how many visitors clicked on it. You used to be able to see those clicks in FeedBurner – until it was completely migrated over to Google, and they got rid of the feature altogether. Considering that some newcomers, like Clicky Analytics, offer you tracking of outbound clicks as a part of the package, I just cannot see any sense for Google Analytics not to notch this mechanism up and include outbound clicks in reporting. This is a very natural expectation of a web analyst, to say the least.

SG 1 - Baidu.com tracked as a referring site.

SG2 - Time period from 1 Jan till 5 June 2009, baidu.com is tracked as a search engine, but no Bing in sight yet...

SG 3 - Time period from 1 Jan till 6 June 2009, Bing appears among Search Engines.

SG 4 - Google is tracked as referring site in Google Analytics, 11 June 2009.